As China’s demand for seafood grows, can it navigate a sustainable course?

A recent study predicts Chinese demand for seafood will outstrip supply by 2030, by as much as 18 million tonnes a year. As a result, the shape of the international fisheries trade is likely to shift dramatically

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Fishing boats wait to be dismantled at Hongze Lake in Jiangsu province on November 3. The local authorities announced a ban on fishing in the lake to protect its biological resources. Photo: Zuma Wire/dpa

Published: 9:30am, 16 Nov 2020Updated: 9:39am, 16 Nov 2020

When Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping began to seriously set about lifting China’s (then) billion-strong population out of squalor and poverty in the 1980s, with the aim of joining that small and lucky part of the world that lived in material affluence, I wonder if he recognised the problems he would create for the rest of the planet?

For the better part of two centuries, the world had maintained a sort of equilibrium, with a small minority of the population concentrated in Europe and North America living in material comfort, relying on the cheap and steady supply of commodities from a necessarily-poor rest of the world.

They were necessarily poor for two reasons: first, if they were paid more for their foodstuff and raw materials, then the cost of the West’s comforts would rise sharply; and, second, because they would become wealthy enough to consume themselves, creating competition for raw materials and for the luxury consumables that until the middle of the 20th century were the exclusive prerogative of the West.

By striving to transform China into a materially comfortable middle-class consumer economy, Deng must surely have recognised that he would more than double the world’s consumers of cars, washing machines, air conditioners, red wine and Louis Vuitton bags.

But did he anticipate the furore it would create in the privileged West? Or the very real environmental challenges and climate disruption that would arise?

These were my musings as I recently read a fascinating study by Beatrice Crona and a team of academics from the Stockholm Resilience Centre on China’s struggles to produce enough seafood to feed its increasingly affluent population.